It probably means that the author of the trope description read The Secret Garden at an impressionable age.
The straight answer is that "wick" is a dialect word meaning "alive" or "lively". (It's related to "quick", as can be seen in expressions like "the quick and the dead".)
- Used in another sense - that is to say, subverted? - in an Isaac Asimov short story, the name of which escapes me. A criminal has been sent to the distant future to live out the remainder of his life in isolation. He arrives about a hundred years before the planet is completely unable to sustain life, and it is a dead world of dust and rock. He spends years travelling its surface, finding absolutely nothing. But one day, he spots a single patch of grass, just a few scraggly brown strands not more than a metre across in all. With tears in his eyes he gives it all the water he can spare before he has to move on. It is one of two other living things on the entire planet apart from himself. And the other thing is, well... far less harmless.
Examples should not be included without a definite identification of the title. (And the author — if this is the story I'm thinking of, which I can't remember the name of either, I have a feeling it's not by Asimov.)
Mind-Altering Substance
Would the moment in Ferngully count towards this trope? Throughout the movie, Crysta struggles with the ability to get even a single seed to sprout, and then when she is able to (almost without any conscious effort on her part), she uses it to defeat Hexxus and awaken her Fertile Feet.
What does "wick heart" mean?
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